On Normality
by Whirlwind18
Summary: "Was it a prank?" he asked her... Sam snapped her head up to look at him, and the sudden expression of raw hurt on her face was enough to make Freddie feel like his heart was inches away from being vomited up from the back of his throat.


**x**

She was always making messes and never cleaning them up.

And Freddie had been raised by a woman who sanitized the crevices between each kitchen floor tile and required twice-daily antibacterial spray downs. His mother got on his nerves—sure—but he'd still grown up believing in the virtues of cleanliness and order.

Sam didn't have any virtues, let alone ones related to order. Sam was perfectly content to wipe barbeque sauce on her sleeves, and smear the sweat from her armpits with her own fingers, and reach both hands into a trashcan because she thought someone had thrown away some half finished ribs.

She was a steel-fisted wreck of impulse and viciousness, and he was sick of her. Sick of putting up with her—sick of being around her—sick of being a punching bag and a target and a maid and a doormat. He didn't need her. Not as a friend, not as anything else.

"Fredward Benson, why is this light still on?"

Freddie looked up at the looming figure in his doorway, his fingers fidgeting half-heartedly along the embroidery on his Galaxy Wars pillowcase. "I can't fall asleep right now, Mom. And I think I'm old enough to decide when—"

"_To nine hours of sleep we never say no. A healthy boy needs his rest in order to grow_…" His mother moved closer to the bed and bent over to plant a sticky kiss on his forehead. "I'm turning the light out now."

"I think I'm done growing by now," Freddie mumbled, but he turned over and lay facing the window, where the rain laced Seattle lights were streaming in through the cracks in the curtains. He knew it would be centuries before he fell asleep.

**x**

He was always doing nubbish things like following school rules, and Sam couldn't stand it.

She was in detention on a Friday afternoon because Freddie had turned her in for unleashing a frog at a rained-in gymnasium cheerleading practice_. Turned her in_ to Principal Franklin.

She frowned as she reconsidered this, propping her legs up on the desk in front of her. She'd done far worse than enjoy watching twenty idiots in skirts scramble around screaming because of a harmless frog, but Freddie couldn't tell her off fast enough when she'd casually mentioned the fiasco to her friends. Even Carly had looked taken aback by his outburst. _"I heard those girls screaming all the way from the Mathletes meeting Sam—no respect for anyone—you realize I'll have to report you—"_

Sam looked up as the door to the detention room crashed open in a dramatic flurry. Ms. Briggs was dragging in a tall boy in a jean jacket by the ears.

"Innocent until proven guilty!" The kid was flailing around like a fish, looking outraged. "Whatever happened to that? You have no proof!"

Ms. Briggs smiled icily. "Be that as it may, Mr. Sanders, when a student demonstrates such flagrant disregard of school rules as to unleash a stink bomb in a classroom, you'll understand that some kind of action must be taken. Maybe we don't have proof, but your record seems to do enough talking on its own."

"Yeah a _record_, lady, that's stuff that happened in the _past_."

"My, what a full house in here today," Ms. Briggs observed, ignoring him. "Not surprising, you students are animals."

The boy in the jean jacket glared at her and then surveyed the classroom. There was a slew of open seats. Sam watched him as he made his way down the aisle and chose the one right next to her.

"I will be back." Ms. Briggs gave them all a deathly stare. "No talking."

As soon as the door slammed shut behind her, the classroom returned to its normal state of chatter.

Sam raised her eyebrows in irritation as the guy reached over and poked her. "Yo. Sam, right?"

She glared at him. "Do I know you?"

"Nah, I'm new here. I got expelled from my old school for setting fire to the boys' bathroom," he explained casually. "But I know you. My little sister's obsessed with that weird Internet show you do."

"Okay."

He poked her again. "You have pretty hair. Did you know that?"

He was looking her up and down and it was making her so uncomfortable that she wished Ms. Briggs would come back. Not because she couldn't have pulverized him, but because he was a male who had just indicated that he could see that she was a girl, and she wasn't oblivious to her own Achille's foot.

"The name's Spike."

Sam drummed her fingers on the desk, pretending not to hear him.

"You want to go out for lunch or something sometime?"

She finally glanced at him. Maybe it was the tattoo that she could barely see the top of on the back of his neck. Or maybe it was the fact that what she wanted to say was, _sorry, asshole, I'm taken_—except that the truth would have been _sorry, I can't get over a dork who pretended to love me but really loves hurting me in every way possible and thinks I'm a menace to society_.

She said yes.

**x**

She was irresponsible and unreliable, not to mention compulsively late.

"Oh my God Freddie, this guy is beautiful. He needs to be on the show."

Carly had grabbed his laptop from his hands and left it teetering precariously on the edge of his computer cart, evidently unable to tear her eyes away from the screen. Her face was glowing in the PearBook's white light.

Freddie grunted his disapproval and cradled the handle of his camera protectively, checking the lens for scrapes where Carly had banged the laptop against it in her haste. "Don't put him on the show… he can't sing. And I'm not auto tuning anyone's voice this time," he added.

"Aw, come on, please? I mean okay, he's not extremely talented and he probably should have opted to sing something besides Ginger Fox's _Baby I Have Beautiful Curves_, but still look at him, just keep looking—are you looking?"

Freddie let out an impatient sigh. "I'm looking."

"Sam would love him." But she frowned as her eyes moved to the time stamp at the top of the computer screen. "If she were actually here."

"I think the key word there is _if_."

Naturally Carly wasn't listening to him, but her attention was also straying from the computer screen as a familiar buzz sounded from the pocket of her light pink jeans. She flipped open her phone and read the message out loud in a monotone. " 'Be there in a few, sorry Carls. We got caught in traffic.' "

Freddie swallowed the sudden chalky feeling at the back of his throat. "Sam?"

Carly nodded and tucked a loose strand of her dark hair behind one ear. "Sent from Spike's phone."

"I don't know why she even bothers texting us." Freddie's teeth were gritted and Carly didn't comment on his use of the plural pronoun, despite the fact that she'd been the only one to receive the message. "It's not like anyone ever expects her to be on time for anything."

Carly shrugged and sighed. "Well, you know, Sam will be Sam."

They had already run through the script a total of four tedious times, Freddie substituting for Sam and delivering her lines in a way that he guessed was much less funny than she would have (because Carly kept rolling her eyes at him), by the time the studio door finally swung open.

Sam was holding a chicken drumstick in one hand and a gigantic plastic cup twice the size of her head in the other. She put the drumstick between her teeth while she unzipped her jacket, tossed it on the floor, and shook some of the light rainwater out of her tangled curls. "Sup, people?"

"Is that a Fat Shake?" Carly's eyes were saucer-sized at the enormous cup in her friend's hand. Freddie couldn't tell whether she was disgusted or impressed.

"Nope." Sam chewed the remaining bits of meat off her drumstick and took a sip from the straw of her shake. "It's an XXXXL Fat Cake and Strawberry Smoothie. New size, only for the true Fat Cake lovers. Want some?"

"Uh, no thanks." Carly backed away from the blonde's outstretched hand as if the cup might suddenly sprout fangs and bite her.

Sam shrugged. "More for me."

Carly smiled and shook her head. "You didn't buy that shake yourself, did you?"

Sam rolled her eyes as if the answer to this question was obvious. "Course not, Spike did."

Carly twiddled her thumbs awkwardly. Freddie knew what was on the tip of her tongue and felt himself gripping his computer cart tightly. "So are you two like… officially… together?"

Freddie swallowed again and tried to ward off the sudden sensation that he was invisible. He cleared his throat noisily.

"I… well, sort of. Maybe." Sam's face lit up then as her phone started beeping. She flipped it open expectantly and laughed. "_Be careful at rehearsal, cutie. Let me know if you need a stunt double._"

There was a short pause. "Um, ha ha," Carly echoed lifelessly.

"He's hilarious." Sam looked nothing short of thrilled as she began texting Spike back.

"Yup," Carly offered, shrugging. Freddie's mind flashed automatically to the image of his crumpled robot costume still lying in the back of the studio, untouched since the embarrassing incident of his failed web show skit months earlier.

"Yeah, well, how nice of you to finally show up." He surprised even himself with the venom in his voice, but he felt satisfied when Sam snapped her head up to look at him, acknowledging his presence at last.

But then the corners of her mouth twitched upward. She was smirking, and his hatred for her was growing tenfold. "Not a problem, Benson."

**x**

He was always driving at ten miles per hour, and it drove her off the deep end. He was the only one of the three of them to get their license so far, and what an epically huge waste of a license it was.

She poked her head into the front seat between Carly and Freddie and groaned. "Fredlumps, at the rate you're going we might as well have walked."

"Put your seatbelt on and stop distracting me Sam," he growled. "I'm not getting a ticket because you refuse to follow safety regulations!"

"_I'm not getting a ticket because you refuse to follow safety regulations_," she mimicked nastily—but Carly whipped around and flashed her a warning look, so Sam sat back and glared out the window.

"And don't worry, Sam," Freddie added, his eyes still on the road. "I'm sure there will still be plenty of time after the show for you to incessantly text Spike until you can be in his arms again."

Sam felt a surge of anger in the pit of her stomach. "Good. Then there'll still be time after the show for you to practice for the Mathletes—oh _whoops_, you won't be needing that."

She knew as soon as the words tumbled out of her mouth that she shouldn't have said them. She was always doing that—realizing stuff too late.

"It's not Freddie's fault he got kicked off the team," Carly offered reasonably to both of them. "They said the web show was taking up too much of his time and he chose us—thank God—you could show some appreciation for our tech producer, Sam."

Freddie said nothing, but Sam could see his knuckles whitening as he clenched the steering wheel more tightly. She lingered for a moment over the painful urge to reach out and put her hand on his shoulder before hastily returning her gaze to the window.

From the front pocket of her backpack, her phone vibrated again. Sam pulled it out, but this time it wasn't a message from Spike.

_**From**__: Karen Yamakahla. _

_**Message**__: I'm confused, why do u want me to go out with Fred Benson so badly?_

**x**

She was rude and reckless and she had terrible table manners. Freddie hated that.

But luckily, Karen Yamakahla was not like Sam at all.

"So I said, 'Ma'am, I've been on the high honor roll my entire life, and I think that speaks for itself.' It's really not the B+ itself that's the problem, it's the principle behind the matter, you know? She had _no_ reason to give me a B+ instead of an A, and I actually think she might have done it because I reminded her of a better, younger version of herself."

"That's possible." Freddie nodded. He was starting to feel frustrated with his inability to feel interested in the pretty raven-haired girl sitting across from him. She was beautiful and smart and she'd asked him out—that didn't happen every day. Who was he to not feel captivated by a girl like her?

"Ooh, this looks so good." Karen pointed her French-manicured fingernail at a spot on her menu. "The lasagna, I've heard it's great here."

Freddie's eyes immediately landed on the item on his own menu. He held his breath as a wave of nausea washed over him.

"No," he said quickly, turning the page. "No, I've had the lasagna here, it's not very good."

"Really? Well okay." Karen shrugged. "You're probably right, it has too many calories. Well, I might go with the French onion soup and fresh greens."

Forty-five minutes and an earful of Karen's various accomplishments and opinions on each teacher at Ridgeway later, they were making their way out of Petrosini's and into the warm evening air.

"I'm glad I only got the soup; it's better for the digestive system, and mine needs to be in top condition for my orchestra concert next month in which I'm the first chair violinist." Karen flashed him a smile with her perfect, gleaming white teeth. "Anyway, Fred, I feel like I don't know anything about _you_."

"Erm, it's Freddie, actually. And I was… well, I was wondering about that, actually. I mean, I know we've had a few classes together, but—you know, we've never talked or anything."

"Oh, I know." Karen looked slightly uncomfortable as she tugged on the sleeve of her carnation pink dress. "But you seem so…so… intelligent. You're a Mathlete, aren't you? I would've joined that team myself if I hadn't decided the honors science club was a much more fulfilling and worthwhile use of my time."

"Oh—I—um—right—" Freddie averted his gaze away from her. He could feel his face turning red. He figured he should explain that he had been booted from the Mathletes, but he couldn't shake the feeling that it didn't matter—he was already gum on the bottom of Karen Yamakahla's shoe.

**x**

He was moody and irritating and apprehensive.

And now that she was with Spike in her living room, and Spike didn't seem even the least bit bothered by the cigarette burns in her couch or the gigantic box of beef jerky her mother had gotten for two dollars off a suspicious looking street vendor on her coffee table, she wondered how she ever could have been so stupid as to think she wanted to be with a boy who would have sooner stuck a fork through his stomach than enjoy himself here.

"Sam, you're one of the hottest girls at Ridgeway. You're a ten." Spike reached out his hand and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, letting his fingers trail down and rest on her collarbone. The action was odd, but it sent goose bumps down her spine.

"Get real." She let out a laugh, trying hard to hide the odd sense of both disbelief and pleasure at Spike's words. Spike thought she was a ten. So the guys who'd sidestepped her for Hot Beautiful Carly for so many years could shove it up their butts. Take that, Ridgeway imbeciles... Splashface commenters... Freddie Benson.

"You are. You're a hot goddess from heaven, Sam Puckett."

"That's the stupidest thing you—"

But then she didn't have time to finish as his lips crashed into hers, hard and fast and hot. She couldn't hold back a gasp when she felt his tongue jam its way into her mouth.

She sat frozen for a moment while he kissed her, trying to rid herself of the disturbing mental image that a very aggressive worm was rolling around in her mouth.

But she wanted this. She wanted this and she was going to prove it. She wrapped her hands around his torso and tried to imitate his movements, moving her mouth back against his.

That was when his hands made their way down to her hips. At first, he rested his palms there, applying pressure to the small of her back and still kissing her. That was fine. This was fun, even.

But then his fingers were working their way under the band of her shirt, and lifting it up, further and further and faster. She opened her eyes just as her shirt came up over her head, then closed them again as Spike started unclasping her bra.

"I—" she started, before being cut off again by Spike's fast-moving mouth. Did he know she had never done this before? Should she mention she'd never done this before? She felt impossibly cold and exposed, even though Spike's fingers were warm against her chest. And she was kind of nauseous too.

He pulled his lips away from hers', moving instead to her neck and then down her chest. He was breathing hard now as he stretched his hands toward her pants, practically ripping the denim in his haste to unbutton them.

Sam sat rigid. It took her a moment to realize that she was clamping her legs down on the couch as hard as possible, in a desperate attempt to delay the act of her jeans being removed. The slightly nauseous sensation was quickly evolving into an overpowering feeling that her stomach was being clawed out, and it was spreading from her abdomen to her chest to her throat.

Her pants were halfway off. She looked down at the top of Spike's head. It felt like staring down at a figure from the top of a twelve-story building, someone too far away to reach even if you yelled your ass off. "Spike—stop—"

When Spike didn't respond, she started to panic a little. And panic was often a precursor to violence. With Pucketts at least. She swallowed the feeling of bone-dry rustiness in her throat and inhaled a gulp of air, trying to will herself to remember who she was here.

"Get—the hell—_off _me." Sam clamped her fingers around Spike's scalp and tugged furiously at two handfuls of hair. When he didn't seem to respond to this, she made the decision to slam her fist into the side of his head, effectively pushing him off balance and sending him tumbling to the rug.

Spike let out a yelp and a slew of expletives. It took him a few seconds to regain his balance before he stood up quickly, his face red and eyebrows knitted. He rubbed the spot on his head where she'd punched him. "What's your problem?"

"I don't want to do this, that's my problem." Sam wished she were wearing her shirt, and that her pants weren't bunched around her calves. He was fully clothed and now looked so many feet taller than her in his standing position, and she suddenly felt humiliated.

Spike shook his head. "I thought you were cool with this." He glared at her, still furiously rubbing his temple.

"I was, but I—" Sam clenched the armrest of the couch with her hand, watching her knuckles turn white. "I changed my mind."

Spike threw up his arms in a way that almost would have been comical, if Sam hadn't been nearly ready to twist them over his head and throw his body out the window. "Awesome. Well maybe you could've made your final decision before I wasted my time."

Sam felt something heavy drop in her stomach. She hated the intonations in Spike's voice, had to hold the armrest even tighter to stop herself from getting up and knocking him out. "You never told me you were gonna do all that stuff. I thought we were just kissing, you know…"

Spike squinted strangely at her, looking as though he were trying to discern whether she was just messing with him. "You said your mom was with her boyfriend for the night."

"And?"

"Nothing. Forget it." He was sneering at her, the muscles in his face tense and hardened.

"Okay, good." She could hear the mounting danger in her own voice. "I'm tired. That okay with you, Your Holiness?"

"Fine. Fine. It's cool with me."

She reached for her bra and shirt and turned away from him as she began dressing herself again, trying to steady her breathing. "Good."

"So what, you want me to leave now?"

"Let's just say you'll be eating the carpet in two seconds if you don't."

"Whatever." Spike was mad at her, but for what? What the hell had _she _done? He was the scumbag who'd practically just admitted she was a pork chop to him.

"You know something Sam? You're a God damn bitch, you really are."

She exhaled her fury. She couldn't risk beating him up and getting sent to juvie again now.

"And by the way, I was lying when I said you were a ten. You're a six point five at most." He slung his backpack over one shoulder, sauntered over to the door and slammed it shut. She locked it behind him.

Somewhere between her twenty-seventh stick of beef jerky and third rerun of Celebrities Underwater, she finally fell asleep.

She dreamt that Freddie had come in, somehow, even though she knew he couldn't pick a lock to save his life. In the dream, he didn't say anything, just sat down on the couch at the littering of plastic jerky wrappers at her feet. She curled up next to him, burying her face in his collar, inhaling every last molecule of the scent of the skin at the nape of his neck.

"_Coming up soon, the old stars of _The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air_ reunite and go under! Can Karyn Parsons swim? Does Will Smith get eaten alive by killer octopi? Find _

_out next!"_

Sam opened her eyes and locked them on the flickering TV screen. The nausea had finally gone away, but the emptiness in her stomach that had replaced it was utterly the most agonizing pain she'd ever felt.

**x**

She was cruel and vicious and way too complicated for one person.

And the voicemail he received that night from Karen Yamakahla left him breathing into the receiver of his cell phone and standing on his kitchen floor feeling like a complete idiot for a full five minutes.

"Fred, there's something I need to confess. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I don't like you and never have. You're also fairly un-intellectual and not very attractive. In addition, there's another man in my life. I wasn't supposed to tell you this, but I don't want to be dishonest with you. The only reason I ever asked you out was because your enemy Samantha Puckett told me to, well, threatened to physically abuse me if I didn't, but I have since reported her and made sure that she has been properly punished. I'm really sorry about this."

**x**

He knew. She knew he knew, but she wasn't sure how much he knew. She'd been given detention every day for two weeks for threatening Karen Yamakahla with physical force, and from the looks of things, she guessed that Karen and Freddie's date hadn't gone well.

She hated everyone. So she did what she did best.

She ran.

**x**

She was aggravating and maddening and confusing, and Freddie didn't know what to do. So he turned to the only person he had ever turned to before for advice about these kinds of things.

"Freddo, I can confirm that when it comes to females, actions speak louder than words." Spencer looked at him wisely from behind the countertop in the Shays' kitchen. He had accidentally burned his right index finger after setting fire to a dishrag, but luckily was already remedying the situation by soaking his entire hand in a glass of pink lemonade. He poured Freddie a glass, too.

Freddie raised his eyebrows tentatively. "What do you mean?"

"Women will often tell you one thing, and then do something completely different. For instance that girl I met buying Fiber Nuts at the yarn store in Newcastle last week—"

"Why were you buying Fiber Nuts at a yarn store?"

"Oh, see the ladies that run the store enjoy including various other useful items for sale. They also sell pumice stones for scraping off dead skin and rubber ducks for bubble baths and/or sponge baths. Anyway, Fiber Nuts are nineteen cents cheaper there than at Hey Food."

Freddie shrugged and nodded.

"It adds up." Spencer removed his finger gingerly from the lemonade and took a sip from the glass. "'Cause Carly and I go through a box of Fiber Nuts every few months or so. We end up saving a buck every… year."

"Do you buy yarn there, too?" Freddie asked.

"Of course not. What do I look like, an elderly busty woman with one blind eye?"

"But then what about the extra money it costs you to use gasoline driving to the yarn store when you could just walk to Hey Food and buy Fiber Nuts with your other groceries?"

"What?"

"Never mind." Freddie shook his head. "You were saying something about a girl…?"

Spencer gave a small yelp of pain and plunged his finger back into his now half-empty glass. "Yeah, I met this hot girl at the gas station last week who _told _me that she had a boyfriend when I asked her if she wanted to get lunch sometime. But then she winked at me before preceding to her Toyota Yaris."

Freddie was feeling more skeptical by the second, but he nodded. "So… then what happened?"

"She drove away. Never saw her again."

There was a long silence. Spencer finished off his lemonade, gave another yelp of pain, and went to the refrigerator to refill his cup.

"Spencer?"

"Yes?"

"Was there supposed to be a point somewhere in there?"

"Yes. Actions speak louder than words." Spencer furrowed his eyebrows, looking extremely thoughtful as he focused his gaze a few inches above Freddie's head. "This girl told me one thing and did another. Winked at me. Which means she wanted me."

Freddie lifted his glass and jiggled it lightly, making the bright pink liquid whirl clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise again at a slightly higher velocity.

"Thanks for the advice, Spence. But one thing. Remind me not to go to you for advice again, okay?"

They each took another simultaneous sip of lemonade, then put down their glasses.

"Sure thing, kiddo."

**x**

She was sitting in the breezeway outside the school. He hadn't known he would find her there until he did. And then it felt like he had known all along.

He jammed his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans and she looked up, acknowledging his presence with a small nod in his direction.

He let the door close behind him, took a deep breath, and kept his eyes square with hers' as he came towards her. He watched Sam's eyes visibly light up as he reached into his bag and extracted a bright red cardboard carton, slightly oil-stained and still warm. The sudden attentiveness in her expression made him want to laugh in spite of everything.

"What's that?"

"Ribs from Chili My Bowl. And barbeque sauce." He held it enticingly in front of her.

"Give it to me." Her voice was even and demanding. He came closer and tossed the carton into her lap, watching with some strange sense of satisfaction as she ripped into it with both hands.

"Was it a prank?" he asked her.

Her eyes bore into him like blue lasers in the dusty light. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Was what a prank?"

"Karen Yamakahla."

It took a few long moments for Sam to respond as she coated a second rib in sauce. "Let's face it Fredward, we all know how little action you get. I figured you could use some help, that's all."

"Well, you're wrong. I can get girls," he added, the phrase tasting awkward and stupid in his mouth. "I mean, I do. Get girls."

Sam smirked, obviously sensing his discomfort. "Right. Tons of them. Some idiotic Twilight-loving fans after you transformed into a vampire. Your dream girl for a couple days after being practically killed by a taco truck. You're a chick magnet, alright."

"I was not practically killed, just a little broken," Freddie bristled in self-defense. He winced, quickly praying inwardly that Sam couldn't tell how close he suddenly was to crying. "And by the way, you left yourself out of that list." He'd hoped he would strike a nerve with this bold statement, but the expression on the infuriating blonde's face remained incredulous.

She let out a hollow-sounding laugh and rolled her eyes. "Get real, Benson. We went on a couple dates and more importantly, you bought me food."

"And you told me you loved me."

Sam gave a noncommittal shrug, keeping her eyes determinedly on the ground. "Don't remember, it's all so vague now. I might have had some bad pork that day."

"You didn't! I was with you that whole day and we—"

"Bad meat gives you parasites. They eat away at your brain and sometimes make you do sick stuff you otherwise wouldn't do in a million years."

Freddie could feel the pounding in his chest beginning to speed up like a jackhammer, fast and fervent with his annoyance at the girl in front of him. "Fine. Okay. Sorry you were sick for so long."

He wiped his palms on the pockets of his jeans, but his face must have given away the plummeting feeling in his stomach, because Sam's expression finally changed slightly. She bit her lip and looked down, tugging lightly at the untied laces of one of her mud-encrusted Converses.

"So why'd you come out here anyway?" Her voice was low and even, but her eyes remained downcast. "Just to ask me about Karen Yamakahla?"

"You're still at school and we have a web show to do in an hour. In case that slipped your mind. I know it's hard to keep everything straight when your thoughts revolve exclusively around Fat Cakes and fried chicken."

Sam snapped her head up to look at him, and the sudden expression of raw hurt on her face was enough to make Freddie feel like his heart was inches away from being vomited up from the back of his throat.

But the look flashed across her features so fleetingly that anyone who had known her even slightly less well would have missed it.

"And please don't try to help me out with 'getting action' again Sam, because I don't even like Karen Yamakahla."

"Well… why not?" She sounded angry now. The carton of ribs fell off of her lap. "She's smart and hot. She even plays in the God damn orchestra. So maybe she's not Carly Shay, but don't tell me that _Karen's_ not normal enough for the high and mighty Freddie Benson."

He could feel beads of sweat forming on his face and neck. He couldn't take it anymore—something in him had finally exploded and he felt like the pieces of it were lying in jagged shards in his stomach.

"What is that supposed to mean?" he shot at her. "Seriously, what do you think this is about?" She raised her eyebrows. He started pacing back and forth.

"Sam, you don't get it. I can't go ten minutes without thinking about you. Everything reminds me of you. I see fried chicken in my biology textbook pictures of cell mitosis." He stopped pacing for a moment and ran a hand feverishly through his hair. His chest was throbbing. He heard himself draw in a shuddering breath of air before he felt it.

It was like someone had pulled a plug and there was nothing he could do. He'd only cried involuntarily one other time in his life—when he was seven and someone had hit him in the back of the head with a baseball. And now he was standing here bawling in front of Sam Puckett, and it was the most humiliating and helpless moment of his entire life.

He turned his back to her, trying to steady himself.

"I—love—you." His voice cracked. He was facing the brick wall.

He heard her sneakers scrape against the ground as she stood up. Her voice was raspy and oddly high-pitched. "Well, someone's been watching too many terrible romantic comedies."

She strode past him and through the metal door, and she didn't look back.

**x**

He was avoiding her like the plague, and she was doing the same. They'd do rehearsals and the web show with as little interaction as possible. She didn't ask for rides anymore. He didn't talk to her in school.

Carly noticed, but Sam had no idea how much Freddie had told her. She was uncharacteristically un-intrusive about the whole thing, reduced to quietness too, so that when the three of them were in the studio together the awkwardness felt like thick smoke in the air.

She avoided Spike, too, who was now constantly walking through the hallways with some freshman girl who wore black lipstick.

There was nowhere to go but home. She had only the blue glow of the TV screen to keep her company when she couldn't sleep at three A.M. Her mother's oblivious ramblings were never much help.

**x**

"I lied, okay?"

Freddie gaped at the blonde-haired figure standing at the door of his fire escape, but his first attempt at sound failed.

"What?" he managed finally.

Sam looked down at her hands, fidgeting with the drawstring on her dark red hoodie. She stayed behind the half-open glass, and she didn't lift her gaze. "I _lied_, okay?"

Freddie inhaled a gulp of air and swallowed it slowly. His throat tasted like rust and fire. He was fighting desperately against his brain, trying to skid the process of putting two and two together to a halt, in case his brain was wrong. "About what?"

The sliding glass rumbled as Sam pushed it all the way open. She climbed swiftly over the ledge and half-tumbled, half-stomped toward him, her frustration suddenly visible in every part of her, from her heavy footsteps to her wild curls spewed out in every direction. She glared at him for half a second before she sent her fist sailing into his upper arm.

Freddie leapt up from his canopy chair and rubbed the throbbing spot on his arm. "What the hell, Sam? That hurt!"

"Do you really have to make everything so hard?"

"_Me_?"

"No, the other striped-shirt-wearing nerd herder out on the fire escape."

Freddie released the breath he'd been holding between his teeth, suddenly entangled in the familiar feeling of defensive irritation he'd so often associated with the obnoxious girl who was, all other things aside, now insulting him after appearing on his fire escape uninvited. "Look Sam, I have work to do and I don't have all night, so if you just came here to—"

"Benson." Her voice cracked on the second syllable. She winced and looked away from him quickly, tilting her head slightly so that her hair shielded the side of her face. She stood stock-still and silent for a few moments. And that was when he noticed the silhouette of her chest beginning to move up and down in slow, jagged movements, intaking breath after breath that didn't seem to be feeding her body in the right way.

Freddie stood helplessly. His instinct was to make some move to comfort her, but another part of him told him to wait. He opened his mouth to say something but closed it when she opened her own, her eyes fixed on some spot on the balcony floor.

"I… I never had any bad pork. And when I said I didn't remember telling you I love you, I was lying."

Freddie had stopped breathing. His eyes locked on her quivering lower lip, glimmering in a ray of white light from his Pear-Pod deck. "Why, Sam?"

"Because I—" She trailed off, her mouth moving in and out. "Because we—" Finally she looked at him straight on, her expression almost pleading. "Because I'm a Puckett. We lie. It's our thing."

He looked at her, and kept waiting.

"Freddie, I…" she crossed her arms over her chest, still shaking, and finally fixed her shifting gaze on the city landscape behind him. "Look, you've already answered that question before yourself, alright? I'm a fuck up. How many times have you said it in your own dorky way yourself? I'm lazy, inconsiderate, a criminal—"

"I don't—"

"And don't fucking tell me you don't think that, because _you _said it. You've screamed it in front of a large crowd at a busy Pear store, in case you forgot."

Freddie winced, struck with an icy feeling in his chest at the not-so-long-ago memory. "Sam—"

"But hey, you were just speaking the truth. I'll be lucky if I don't end up in jail before I'm twenty, and you… you're a nerd—and a nub—and you follow rules, and you're _going_ places and you deserve a girl like that, you know, someone who's all smart and can go to the model train club without blowing stuff up and—actually I don't know any girls who can even come close to competing with your dorkiness, but I thought Karen Yamakahla seemed like a pretty good match—"

"Sam—" He moved closer to her, his heart pounding in his throat.

"But even if it's not her, she's out there somewhere ya know, and she's also probably all gorgeous and stuff and she won't do any of that stuff you hate like chew with her mouth open or use too much Parmesan or…" she paused, looking slightly winded. "And she'll be perfect and you'll fall in love with her and forget about_ iCarly_ and stuff, well maybe not _iCarly_, you'll remember Carly but not me because that's what you deserve, okay? So I can't—you can't just—"

He kissed her.

Her body tensed up under his grip until he felt like he was holding onto a wooden board. But he kept holding on, and when she finally threw her hands onto his shoulders and started responding he had the sensation that every painful feeling he had ever had was worth it.

They broke apart, their noses still touching.

She looked as dizzy as he felt, her expression full of the rare vulnerability and affection that had led to the beginning of their relationship that night at the lock-in. It had left him shocked and bewildered that night, like his world was tumbling apart. Now it left him warm and full, like his world was finally coming back together.

Her face was red. She pressed it into his neck.

"I'm sorry," she said in a muffled voice into his chest. "For not doing anything, y-you know, when you were crying."

He wasn't sure how long they stood like that. He felt like he wouldn't have minded forever, but at some point Sam pulled away, reaching into the large lumpy front pocket of her sweatshirt.

"I almost forgot." She extracted what looked like a tiny, smashed-up silver package. "Cheeseburger?"

Freddie raised his eyebrows, slightly revolted. "Where did you get a cheeseburger and how did you pay for it?"

"Groovy Smoothie. T-Bo's got them on sticks now. He wrapped it up and gave it to me on the house if you can believe that, guess I must have looked really depressed when I came in."

Freddie reached skeptically for her outstretched hand, peeled off the greasy paper, and rolled his eyes. Only a piece of bun, a sticky slice of cheese, and the lettuce and tomato were left. "It's eaten."

Sam looked unconcerned. "Yeah, sorry, it just smelled so good on the way here. But then I thoughtfully stopped and saved the rest for you."

He laughed into her hair. "What is this, some kind of terrible romantic comedy?"

**x**

He was nerdy and insufferable, and it seemed like that would never change.

They were at Carly's eating spaghetti tacos for dinner. Carly had cooked the spaghetti and had managed to boil it for just a little too long, as usual. But luckily they had meat and cheese to go with them this time, and as long as meat was involved, Sam was happy.

That was, until she bit down on something sour and crunchy. She grimaced as she spit her food into her napkin. Amongst the chewed-up pieces of taco and meat were the remains of some strange-looking multicolored pill.

"What is this?" she demanded, trying to rid her mouth of the taste.

Freddie was squirming in his seat. "Erm… what?"

"_This_. This weird pill."

Carly looked confused; Freddie's face was turning redder by the second. Sam shot him a disbelieving glare, then brought the broken pill to her nose and breathed in several suspicious, drawn-out sniffs. Finally she clamped her fingernails around it and grimaced as a tiny trail of goo and yellow beads began to trickle down her palm.

She reached her arm across the table, wiping the sticky residue forcefully on Freddie's forearm. "You put a _vitamin_ in my taco."

"I… um… no I didn't…" Freddie began wiping off his arm with a napkin, looking everywhere but at her. Carly looked like she was trying desperately not to laugh.

"Yeah you did! I didn't put this vitamin in here! Carly, did you put this vitamin in here?"

"Nope." Carly began to giggle.

Freddie threw up his arms in defeat. "You can't get all the nutrients you need from meats and carbohydrates, Sam, sometimes you need the vitamins in fruits and vegetables! Do you know how many times my mom has made me recite the food pyramid to her from memory?"

"Do you know what a psycho _freak_ your mom is?"

"Well, either way, she knows her food pyramid, and you—"

"I could care less about the food pyramid, _Freduccinni_, and anyway, what kind of idiot thinks they can get away with mashing a gigantic vitamin into a taco, did you really think I wouldn't notice?"

Freddie looked affronted. "It was a last resort! Who knows what kinds of sicknesses you're already prone to because your body is lacking in key defensive nutrients."

Sam opened her mouth in anger, but Carly cleared her throat loudly. "Alright alright, calm down, both of you. Sam, it's not nice to call people's mothers psycho freaks. Freddie, it's not nice to hide vitamins in people's dinner." She stood up, her chair scraping against the floor. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go ask Spencer if he's got the salt and pepper in his room again."

Still avoiding eye contact, Freddie stood up after Carly went upstairs. He began to clear the bowls off the table.

But Sam wasn't done, and no food ever got to call itself a leftover when she hadeaten dinner, not even Carly's overcooked spaghetti.

The only logical solution was to distract him by tackling him to the ground.

She must have caught him off guard because he yelped and toppled over quickly when she pushed him, a bowl flying out of his hands and spraying the kitchen with Mexican cheese. His back hit the floor with a thud that sounded slightly painful.

"Sam!" he protested, struggling to free himself from her grip. His eyes were wide with alarm.

"I wasn't done eating." And then, because she felt a little bad for hurting his back and because no one had ever cared enough to sneak vitamins in her food before and because her nose was so close to his face that she could practically smell the delicious corn shell taco on his breath, she leaned in and kissed him.

"Sorry," she said as she pulled away. "You um, had something on your mouth."

She gazed down at him, still pinning his body to the floor. He looked up at her and attempted what she assumed was supposed to be his Alluring Freddie Smirk, but the effect was slightly offset by the fact that he looked sort of dizzy. "Sorry about the vitamin."

"Don't let it happen again."

Then she leaned in and kissed him again.

"Sam? Freddie? Where did you—oh my God."

Sam tumbled off of him and the two of them leapt up so fast that Freddie hit his head on the countertop, slipped on the grated cheese, and had to stand up a second time. Spencer and Carly were standing in front of them wearing matching expressions of horrified shock.

"Um…" Freddie shifted in an adorably embarrassed way, rubbing his head. He gave her a sideways glance. "We can explain… I think…"

Carly strode forward and flicked Sam on the shoulder. "That's it. No more vitamins for either of you, ever."

Spencer brushed his hand over the countertop and licked his fingers sadly. "Yeah, no more wasting Mexican cheese."

**x**

She was always making messes and never cleaning them up.

Sometimes, he didn't really mind.


End file.
